Fantasy and
Imagination

July 25,
2006

[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate,
November 29, 1994]

Why has liberalism failed? I
think the reason is that liberalism stands for fantasy in politics, whereas
conservatism stands for imagination. In the short run, fantasy prevails; but
imagination will have the last word.

We usually
confuse imagination with fantasy. But
this is a mistake. The two things are nearly
opposites; or rather they are related to each other as youth is related to
adulthood.

A
daydream is fantasy, a flight from reality, a wishful and superficial series of
images; just as socialism is a fantasy, a dream of a world divorced from
nature. It is easy to fantasize a world in which all men are brothers and
share their possessions unselfishly; it is more difficult to explain why such a
world can never be. Shallow people call the pursuit of such fantasies
idealism.

Unlike
fantasy, real imagination explores reality and possibility. You cant
separate it from the intellect. It takes imagination to see the world as it is,
to understand people as they are, to grasp the remote implications of ideas,
to foresee the results of various courses of action, to perceive abstract
relations, to find analogies, to view a single truth from many angles, to sort
out the essential from the inessential.

The
Iliad and King Lear tell stories with little or no basis in
what we call fact; but they are works of imagination, not fantasy. They have
a powerful internal logic that fantasy lacks. That is why we speak of their
imaginative truth (not fantastic truth).

Fantasy is
bold and passionate; imagination is more cautionary and objective. The youth
who wants to rush headlong into a project may be inspired by a dream; but
his father, who cautions him against it out of his own experience, may
actually be more imaginative, in the sense of being more capable of imagining
the real outcome. Imagination is a mode of seeing and knowing; fantasy is
usually blind.

Fantasy
has its place, and the youth may be right when his father is wrong. We need
our dreams, provided we remember that they are, after all, only dreams. And
of course there is such a thing as excessive caution. Besides, to idealize the
past, as conservatives sometimes do, is only another kind of fantasy. But as
a general matter experience enriches the imagination, and we disregard it at
our peril.

I
dream of things as they never were, and ask, Why not? said Bernard
Shaw, a socialist. We can now see that the failure of socialism was precisely
a failure of imagination, because it was a triumph of fantasy. The socialists
failed to imagine everything that actually happened when their scheme was
imposed on intractable reality.

It was the
realists  preeminently a few prophetic men like Ludwig von Mises
 who had the imagination to know in advance why socialism would fail.
They were even accused of cynicism for rejecting the fantasy. In a supreme
delusion, fantasy became a moral test which any sane man was bound to
flunk.

You might
even say that in our time fantasy has managed to keep imagination on the
defensive. In democratic politics, fantasy always has a natural advantage,
because everyone can fantasize but few can imagine. The fallacy is fun; the
refutation is heavy lifting. The world is perpetually easier to seduce than to
persuade.

Liberalism,
our watered-down piecemeal version of socialism, still relies on a rhetoric of
fantasy  and self-righteous fantasy at that. The liberal proposes his
dream of, say, national health care; and then he reviles as
inhumane and lacking compassion those who
assume the burden of imagining the real consequences.

When, amid
the ruins, one side says to the other, I told you so,
thats imagination rebuking fantasy. Using the imagination can be a
hard and thankless task. And conservatives often fail in imagination when it
is most needed. Sometimes they have nothing more than the stubborn
intuition that the liberal fantasy is overlooking something they cant
specify. But even then they are usually right.

But
fantasizing is always easy  fatally easy. The world is often short on
foresight, but it never runs out of dreams. We should enjoy our dreams
without being tyrannized by them.

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